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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

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Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#461

Post by adamrezich »

kenjackson wrote: post #450
adamrezich wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conundrum is that by thinking this way about population groups that are not your own, and imposing your will—no matter how well-intentioned—upon them, you are undermining the agency and self-determination of said population groups. I believe that in order to actually enact meaningful change, even deeper-rooted causes must be discovered and examined—and while this is certainly possible in theory, it's essentially…

> I believe that in order to actually enact meaningful change, even deeper-rooted causes must be discovered and examined How do you discover deeper-rooted causes if you can't be provided resources to study the distinction? How can you understand why black women are 3x more likely to die at child birth than white women if the funding agencies don't care about the answer?

That sure is a topic that is well outside the purview of this discussion. But for what it's worth, I generally don't place a lot of stock in studies that report such findings anymore—their methods don't usually hold up to much scrutiny, in my experience.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#462

Post by Manuel_D »

michaelt wrote: post #270
boohoo123 wrote: post #118

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the i…

> Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Doing so doesn't hurt. In my college, exams and coursework were graded this way. Unfortunately with resumes it isn't so easy. If I tell you I attended Brigham Young University, my hobby is singing in a male voice choir, and I contributed IDE CD-RW drive support to the Linux kernel - you can probably take a guess at my demographics.

They could replace the university name with things like the university's median SAT admissions score, and admissions rate.

Previous work experience is relevant to the job, so it'd be hard to argue removing that information, and working on older technology does imply a minimum age. Though I guess theoretically one could be a retro computing enthusiaist.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#463

Post by dml2135 »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #354
gadders wrote: post #179

This is so depressing. This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name. It should never, ever be about hard quotas. It absolutely should be about using some contextual information (factoring the person's school environment in) and challenging assumptions about stereotypes so that you are not deciding who is best on assumptions but on evidence.

"This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name." I'd be interested to read about a DEI effort that gives the rest a good name.

You expand your pipeline into places where you were not previously looking. Go recruit at a historically black college, or a Women Who Code convention. You don’t need to lower standards.

The talent is out there. If you’re not even looking in the right places, that’s the first place to start.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#465

Post by sneedle »

immibis wrote: post #448
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quota issue isn't that you have an explicit hiring quota for each race -- which might even be illegal. It's that if, at the end of the year, the number of people you hired had a large racial disparity, that's bad optics and you'll get in trouble, which you know so you fudge things to change it however you can. So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants.…

> So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.

Or you stop trying to force blacks into the job and hire whoever applies and is the most qualified. This way people don't die just so leftists can feel satisfied.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#466

Post by thaumasiotes »

immibis wrote: post #448
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quota issue isn't that you have an explicit hiring quota for each race -- which might even be illegal. It's that if, at the end of the year, the number of people you hired had a large racial disparity, that's bad optics and you'll get in trouble, which you know so you fudge things to change it however you can. So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants.…

> So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.

There are only so many black people in the country. Every skilled job has this problem; poaching can make you look slightly better but it does nothing overall and will make wherever you poached your qualified black applicants from look worse.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#467

Post by sneedle »

cyberax wrote: post #396
intended wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found one thing odd, which was outside of the scope over the zero sum game being fought here. If you are understaffed, AND you are hiring traditionally, it would make sense that recruiting people would go up. That would mean diverse hires anyway - based on the article, it seems that even increasing diversity was not between undeserving candidates and ideal candidates (the second band section of the article) Is the…

> AND you are hiring traditionally And the FAA stopped doing that. They revamped the hiring process to screen against the White applicants. The way they did it, is also highly insulting to Black people, btw.

[flagged]

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#468

Post by varloid »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #440
aesh2Xa1 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI. For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"): https://archive.ph/Qgjy5 The evi…

The answer to the question you've quoted is important, since it could be "none", "a little bit", "a lot", "any amount", each of which has very different ramifications. There is no answer on the slide ...

They decided that at least some amount was acceptable - the minimum score on the AT-SAT was changed so that 95% of test takers would pass because the original threshold where 60% passed excluded too many black applicants. This was despite previous studies showing that a higher score on the AT-SAT was correlated with better job performance.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#469

Post by AnthonyMouse »

immibis wrote: post #448
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quota issue isn't that you have an explicit hiring quota for each race -- which might even be illegal. It's that if, at the end of the year, the number of people you hired had a large racial disparity, that's bad optics and you'll get in trouble, which you know so you fudge things to change it however you can. So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants.…

> So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.

Ah yes, but that isn't guaranteed to work, and if someone is going to get in trouble if they don't make their numbers then they start making contingencies.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#470

Post by nitwit005 »

typewithrhythm wrote: post #430
scott_w wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I’ve said twice now: it was the actual thing that was done (in this case, lowering standards and throwing qualified people to the wolves) that was lazy and stupid, not the umbrella “DEI” itself. That’s because the actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time. It’s things like outreach, financial support, changing societal attitudes. Instead of that, they took the lazy opt…

Spending any tax money on programs designed to only help "DEI" causes is racist. From rich to poor I see as ethical, but there are current programs that are gated on race. This is taking from all to give to a chosen race, all DEI practices should be eliminated from government actions.

There are very boring things that have been done in the past to increase diversity, like making sure recruiters actually went to black universities to recruit, instead of... mysteriously skipping them. Technically that cost something, but basically negligible.

The problem cases are after that, when people get upset the numbers didn't change as much as they hoped, and decide to go do fiddle with the hiring process.

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